Tansy Davies’s neon and inside out 2 can’t help but recall Stravinsky’s 1940s commission for Woody Herrmann’s orchestra, the Ebony Concerto. There’s an idiomatic use of rich, low-pitched sounds (plenty of bassoon and bass clarinet), and insidious, catchy dance rhythms bounce away in the bass. There’s a hint of Louis Andriessen-style Euro-Minimalism too; these are pieces which really move. But there’s a satisfying darkness to Davies’s imagination; for all the foot-tapping, this is music with unsettling power and immediacy.
The main work on the disc is the recent song cycle Troubairitz - eight songs setting English translations of texts by 12th-century female troubadours, given sparse, improvisatory percussion accompaniments and sung coolly by Anna Snow, whose vibrato-free voice suits the music’s restraint perfectly. For all that Davies’s angular melodies inform us that this is 21st-century music, these songs sound archaic and timeless, as if they’re being composed on the spot.
Elsewhere we have imaginative remixes of several pieces featured on the disc – Gabriel Prokofiev’s entertaining deconstruction of neon making one appreciate how strange the work sounds in its original form. Recorded with Christopher Austin and the Azalea Ensemble.
Find Troubairitz (Nonclassical) on Amazon
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